hyporational comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: tut 08 January 2014 12:14PM

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Comment author: hyporational 11 January 2014 06:06:26AM *  2 points [-]

I don't instinctively like downvotes either, and I suspect it's mostly my personality that magnifies everything negative out of proportion i.e. there's depressive bias. However, if I get downvoted for something really stupid, I find the punishment a very useful deterrent that also works for my personal life. It's the inexplicable votes that bug me the most, but hey, you can't please everyone.

I subscribed to Eliezer's fb feed about a month ago and I'm glad he doesn't post such unpolished ideas here. I think he also posts there because the commenters are better selected and not anonymous. I might be in favor of an upvote only system, if it weren't for the really terrible outlier posters who need to be hidden quickly. For upvotes only , we would need a completely different visibility system.

Comment author: [deleted] 11 January 2014 07:17:25AM 0 points [-]

One way this is often addressed is replacing downvote with flag, and with enough flags it gets hidden (flags and upvotes aren't inverses of each other).

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 11 January 2014 09:58:25AM 1 point [-]

That doesn't seem to scale well with the number of readers. Some discussions attract more people than others; so in the less popular discussions almost nothing would be flagged, but in the more popular ones, any slightly controversial comment would be flagged.

Comment author: [deleted] 11 January 2014 05:37:00PM 0 points [-]

You are assuming a fixed cutoff which I was not.